Oskar Kokoschka's illustrated book The Dreaming Boys (Die träumenden Knaben) is a stream-of-consciousness about a boy’s sexual awakening. In this plate, one of the book's eight photolithographs in color, four nude young women can be seen in a fantastical landscape. The enigmatic setting fittingly evokes a fairy-tale: in 1907, Fritz Waerndorfer, the financial backer of the Wiener Werkstätte (an important design workshop in Vienna), had commissioned Kokoschka to create a children’s book. At the time, Kokoschka was just twenty years old and still a student at Vienna’s Kunstgewerbeschule (School of decorative arts). The flat colors, strong black outlines, and stylized forms in Kokoschka’s images reveal his engagement with decorative impulses at the time known as Art Nouveau. Kokoschka dedicated the book to his mentor, Gustav Klimt, a symbolist painter from whom he borrowed the images’ square format.